The present invention relates to an accompaniment registration apparatus and an automatic accompaniment apparatus, suitable for use in an electronic musical instrument or in other applications. More particularly, the invention relates to registration and reproduction of a free accompaniment pattern which is defined by a prescription data effective to designate a set of parallel parts freely collected from different original accompaniment patterns corresponding to various styles.
The conventional electronic musical instrument adopts one type of the automatic accompaniment apparatus having a memory for storing a plurality of original accompaniment patterns corresponding to various styles such as Rock and Waltz. When a desired style is selected, the corresponding accompaniment pattern is reproduced to effect an automatic accompaniment. Each original accompaniment pattern is comprised of a multiple parts such as a chord part and a bass part so that the automatic accompaniment is performed by parallel reproduction of the multiple parts in an orchestral manner. However, the plurality of original accompaniment patterns are provisionally written into the memory by "factory setting". The written original accompaniment pattern is fixed, and is therefore never modified or arranged by a user; hence the reproduced accompaniment is rather plain and not interesting.
Another type of the conventional accompaniment apparatus can register a free accompaniment pattern made by the user. The free accompaniment pattern is reserved in a memory for the automatic accompaniment reproduction. This technology can be applied to the first-mentioned prior art such that the user can compose a desired set of multiple parts of a free accompaniment pattern, which is then registered in a memory for the automatic accompaniment reproduction. However, in such a construction, the user must preset all of the parts for each free accompaniment pattern. Such tedious preset work may disadvantageously require time and labor, as the number of parallel parts increases.
Aside from the above noted prior art, the inventors are presently working with a new type of the automatic accompaniment apparatus provided with an arrangement function effective to select a desired set of individual parts to define a free collective accompaniment pattern, from different original accompaniment patterns each composed of multiple parts such as a chord backing part, a bass part and a rhythm part. The set of selected parts are registered, and concurrently read out in parallel manner with each other to reproduce the free collective accompaniment pattern. However, all the individual parts must be collected from a limited group of original accompaniment patterns having the same pattern length and the same beat number so as to ensure consistency of the free accompaniment pattern among the collective parallel parts. If the selected parallel parts have different pattern lengths or different beat numbers such as three-beat and four-beat, the reproduced automatic accompaniment is inconsistent in parallel progression of the multiple parts. Thus, the prior work (not prior art) suffers from the drawbacks that freedom of the part collection or combination is rather limited to obviate full use of the original accompaniment patterns. The same is true for composing a serial performance pattern of a given song from original performance pattern components having various beat numbers.